The first Mars One colonists will suffocate, starve, and be incinerated, according to MIT

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In the 2020s, Mars One — essentially a Dutch-made extraplanetary reality TV show — will send amateur astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars. Their attempts to colonize the Red Planet will be televised — which, according to a new report by aerospace researchers at MIT, might make for particularly morbid viewing. The MIT researchers analyzed the Mars One mission plan and found that the first astronaut would suffocate after 68 days. The other astronauts would die of starvation, dehydration, or incineration in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The analysis also concludes that 15 Falcon Heavy launches — costing around $4.5 billion — would be needed to support the first four Mars One crew. In short, the colonization of Mars will make for some seriously compelling TV.

Following the announcement of its one-way mission to Mars in 2012, some 200,000 people registered their interest on the Mars One website. That number has now been whittled down to 705 candidates — a fairly even mix of men and women from all over the world (but mostly the US, of course!) Several teams of four astronauts (two men, two women) will now be assembled, and training will begin. The current plan is to send a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the first team of four to Mars in 2022 — just eight years from now. The whole thing will be televised as a reality TV show. In the interim, a number of precursor missions — supplies, life-support units, living units, and supply units — will be sent to Mars ahead of the human colonizers. More colonists will be sent fairly rapidly thereafter, with 20 settlers expected by 2033.

The technology underpinning the mission is rather nebulous, though — and indeed, that’s where the aerospace researchers at MIT find a number of potentially catastrophic faults. Basically, while we kind of have the technology to set up a colony on Mars, most of it is at a very low technology readiness level (TRL) and untested in a Mars-like environment. Mars One will rely heavily on life support and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) — squeezing water from Martian soil and oxygen from the atmosphere — but these technologies are still a long way off large-scale, industrial use by a nascent human colony on Mars. NASA’s next Mars rover will have an ISRU unit that will make oxygen from the Red Planet’s atmosphere of CO2 — but that rover isn’t scheduled to launch until 2020, just two years before the planned launch of Mars One.

After 68 days, oxygen levels will spike after the first wheat crop reaches maturity — and then all hell will break loose

The paper prepared by the MIT researchers [PDF] is rather damning. Basically, due to the difficulty of shipping supplies to Mars, the colonists will mostly live off the land. The problem is, plants produce a lot of oxygen — and in a closed environment, too much oxygen is a bad thing (things start to spontaneously explode). So, you have to vent the oxygen — but we don’t yet have the technology to vent oxygen without also venting the nitrogen, which is used to pressurize the various Mars One pods. As a result, air pressure will eventually get so thin that the colonists can’t breathe — with the first one dying of hypoxia after 68 days. Other potential modes of death are: starvation (the current Mars One plan simply doesn’t contain enough calories for the colonists); dehydration; CO2 poisoning; and death by spontaneous immolation due to a rich oxygen atmosphere.

The researchers also note that Mars One’s plan of sending more colonists after the original four is a bad, bad idea. Not only will this exacerbate any technological issues, but there’ll be an ever-increasing demand on resources like food and water, and faster wear-and-tear that will require more replacement parts. All of these factors will increase the number of resupply craft, pushing the total cost of the project into tens of billions of dollars.

Breakdown of the first few cargo missions as part of the Mars One colonization. Note the growing percentage of ECLSS (life support) spare parts. It is expected that stuff will break down a lot on Mars, and new parts have to be flown in from Earth. (Or 3D-printed in-situ, but we’re not there yet.)

In short, the MIT researchers find a lot of problems with the current plans laid out by Mars One. Dutch entrepreneur and CEO of Mars One, Bas Lansdorp, disputes the contents of the MIT report, saying “oxygen concentrators” already exist — and if oxygen levels and air pressure can be kept stable, then many of MIT’s other assertions about dehydration and starvation are moot.

In any case, the MIT report highlights that Mars One might be overreaching slightly. I think it’s totally feasible that Mars One can get people to Mars, but their quality of life once they get there will probably be pretty rough. This isn’t to say that colonizing Mars is impossible: We could certainly have the technology ready in the next few years if there was enough money/sponsorship behind it — but so far, I don’t think Mars One has progressed far enough or fast enough to colonize Mars in 2022. At least not ethically, anyway: There’s always the option that Mars One will send the settlers to Mars knowing full well that they won’t survive longer than 68 days. It would be the perfect and sickening culmination of society’s infatuation with reality TV.

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